Say 'baa baa' to fat-free sheep

I AM struggling to build up a good head of outrage. Everything I read seems unpleasantly familiar. Cops are crooked, tenders are rigged, men are shot, women are raped, the capitalists are winning, the Sharks are losing ...

Perhaps I should pack it all in and begin a new life. Get a proper job, drink light beer, take up jogging, go out for family pizza night, recycle my rubbish, wear V-neck sweaters, take an interest in sport, vote for the DA and, most important of all, stop reading newspapers.

While trying to decide which would be less painful - changing my lifestyle or shooting myself in the face - a headline caught my attention: "Bong sale calms Dutch market."

I imagined the market was in uproar because Israel's nuclear weapons programme was making the oil-producing countries jumpy and driving up the price of fuel, which, in turn, drove up the price of cheese, eels and poffertjes, which can't possibly be as gay as they sound.

The Dutch aren't big on rampaging, so the market probably ground to a standstill as shoppers gathered in small, tidy groups to mutter darkly and shake their heads. In Holland, this is the equivalent of a full-blown riot.

Then, moments before a policeman arrived, a hemp-coated hippie set up a table and began selling bongs for 80% off. People crowded around, laughing and chatting and stocking up on hubbly-bubblies ahead of the cruel European winter.

Apparently I misread the headline: "Bond sale calms Dutch market."

The story was full of weasel words like "budget limit" and "savings package" and "deficit target".

The crisis was caused when Geert Wilders pulled his Freedom Party out of the government because he was no longer willing to be dictated to by Brussels, whatever the hell that means.

Wilders looks like the result of an experiment that went awry in one of Josef Mengele's racial purification projects. He is over three metres tall, with platinum hair that is styled in a wind tunnel driven by solar power or, on overcast days, 28 Arab refugees on bicycles. In terms of Freedom Party policies, these are the only immigrants who should be allowed to live in Holland.

People think Africa is the doomed continent. They are wrong. Europe is the new title-holder. While the rich dig their moats, making sure the drawbridge man is on speed-dial, the wretched refuse are abandoning their teeming shores like the rats they are.

These are the new boat people. Adrift on the capricious ebb and flow of currency fluctuations, they arrive not on rafts, but on cruise ships. Some can be seen glued to the telly at The George in Umhlanga, shouting for Chelsea while quaffing flagons of imported ale.

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to eat crayfish for the price of a pint back home.

So how about that Peng Peng? There's a picture of her in the paper, on her knees, looking coyly at the camera. Phwoar! Wouldn't say no to a piece of that.

It seems the Chinese have cottoned on to the fact that a fair number of non-Chinese are aware of their intention to eat their way through the planet and have come up with an alternative to avoid a situation where five billion of us are phoning through orders of sweet-and-sour panda because it's the only food left on earth.

The alternative is Peng Peng. Cloned in a laboratory far from prying Western eyes, Peng is a genetically modified sheep. If you eat lots of normal sheep while, say, watching rugby, you will one day die of cardiovascular disease. In other words, sheep are God's way of killing people who watch rugby.

The Chinese follow rugby with the same passion that they follow the teachings of Christ, so it's understandable that they would tamper with the laws of nature and give us lamb shanks that will stave off cardiac arrest long enough for us to learn Mandarin and find our way around the salt mines.

While I have never seen sheep having sex, it's probably not suitable as an outing for the children. The Chinese method is way more wholesome. Find a roundworm, preferably one that is sympathetic to the pro-democracy movement, then crush it mercilessly. Take some of its DNA and stick it into a cell from the ear of a Merino sheep. Insert the cell into an unfertilised egg and implant it into the womb of another sheep who can be trusted not to go around the farmyard bragging about an immaculate conception and bullying all the other animals into going to pen once a week to worship her divine offspring.

Since your modified mutton contains the good kind of fat found in nuts, seeds and fish, you can eat as much as you like without worrying about your arteries. Committed carnivores like Khulubuse Zuma will be able to step up their intake from two to five sheep a day.

Not only will eating worm-sheep make us healthier, but our unborn children may very well turn out to have two heads and four arms. This means they can do twice as much work in half the time and we only have to pay school fees for one.

Deep-fried mutants in oyster sauce. Coming soon to a Chinese takeaway near you.